Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection | Themes

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection Themes

The Importance of Language in Understanding the World

As a post-modernist, Kristeva believes that the only way one can relate to or understand the world is through the medium of language. Anything that is completely non-linguistic is literally unintelligible. There are several important consequences of this theory. First, since language is not a private entity, but rather the product of a society, language transmits the ideology of society. Since one understand the world through language, it is therefore impossible to see the world in an unbiased way; one is always seeing the world through a set of biases and prejudices that one inherited from society. Another consequence of this is that it makes understanding radically different cultures and societies difficult, if not impossible. If two cultures have radically different languages then they also have radically different ways of understanding the world. Taken to an extreme, some post-modernists (and Kristeva is one of them) argue that logic itself is...
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